Edith listened carefully while her husband unburdened himself. Her sickle nose traveled slowly up as she deliberated.
“The solution is unfortunate,” Edith said at last, but with a certain pride of achievement. “Liza Barrow,” she said, “must hang by a woman’s hand.”
Gerry startled.
It had never occurred to those discreet committees that women might enjoy a power denied to men. It had occurred to Edith, however. There had been reports in other cities, all confused, all unverified, of women having managed, with difficulty, to murder their husbands’ mistresses or to poison their mothers. Edith had kept careful account; had pondered them in her heart well before this morning. And women still did manage to kill themselves, after all.
“Obviously, she must wear a hood,” Edith said simply. Gerry raked his fingers through his hair. An uneasy smell of potatoes in oil lingered in the room. “And there’s no need to flounce around in petticoats for a hanging. No one need ever know.”
Gerry stood, and his shoulders pushed to his ears. “I shouldn’t like,” he said, “I shouldn’t like the woman who’d willingly undertake that duty.”
Edith shot him a look: he should know better than to make such declarations. She gazed into her gathered hands. For one sour moment she wondered if she shouldn’t have said anything. “It is a duty,” Edith reflected. “And I am prepared to satisfy it, if no one else will.”
1899, Mar 1st.
Samuel HEWITT, 24 (Jealousy, Drink)
Hewitt lost his job as a toolmaker and was reduced to asking Mary Rowledge’s father for work; he and Mary had just become engaged. Bedeviled by shame into resentment, Hewitt grew suspicious of Mary’s friendship with her family’s boarder, a Mr. Robert “Black Robby” Freedman. Hewitt, morbidly drunk, accused Mary of an affair, then declared he’d not gone to work at all at Mr. Rowledge’s shop that week, and that he would hang before he did. After more words in the same line, he bashed in Mary’s head with a hammer and wrote “I OWN YOU” over her forehead. When Mary woke the next morning, Hewitt had fled, but police found him blacked out in a brothel only blocks away.
Mary testified with an ink smear still visible on her rubbled brow. Hewitt protested his innocence to the very moment of his execution.
Edith visited her daughter Caroline in the afternoon for tea, though Caroline took none herself, as Peter, her husband, had forbidden stimulants of any kind. Caroline was pregnant with her first child, and she sat petting her belly with a look of satisfaction and preening as if she’d eaten a whole pie.
“I wish you’d let me open the curtains,” Edith said, glancing at the muffled bays, then the hissing gaslight sconces. “It’s an extravagance—it’s a vice, in this sun.”
“Peter doesn’t want the city air to get in,” Caroline said serenely. “It’s unhealthy for the baby.” She drew out the last word, bay-bee, as if teaching it to Edith.
“Nonsense,” Edith announced.
“Oh, Mother.”
Somewhere behind her, Peter was lurking; in the hall, in another room. Peter was a wealthy husband—worm’s wealth, Edith added a little savagely. He imported silks, and that ethos of vulgar display traveled through the house like a burnt smell. For instance, the andirons flanking the fireplace: brass nudes in the shape of long-suffering caryatids, their breasts more expressive than their smiles. Edith hoped in a few years she could persuade Caroline to have them hammered into napkin rings.
“Mother,” Caroline repeated, and now the word sounded very different, “Peter told me about your—your intention—” She frowned, baffled. “I wouldn’t like it. It’s out of the question, really.”
Ah, Edith thought. Ah; that was why she’d been summoned to tea, and why Caroline had begged her to wear her black frock, despite the late spring heat. She’d actually sent that with the messenger boy: I beg you. For Peter’s sake. Peter definitely wouldn’t like his mother-in-law’s hangmanning, and so Caroline must dislike it too, and persuade her out of it. The list of things this child had arranged to dislike about her mother, in twenty-one years, was extraordinary. She didn’t like Edith’s hands: red and muscular, farmgirl’s hands. Caroline, twelve, had once asked Edith to cover them, even in the house. But Edith liked her hands. They looked like her grandmother’s hands twisting chicken necks with a sharp, musical pop.
The week before, Gerry had had the police commissioner and the governor’s lawyer over for brandies. After some stiff pleasantries, Edith had disappeared around a blind corner in the hall and listened.
“It’s out of the question,” the governor’s lawyer had said. “You know how scandal has its way of getting out—how long do you trust your men not to tell that one over drinks?” He wiped the rim of his snifter with a silk pocket square after each sip. “The hang-woman. No. A week? A month?”
“Why would Edith even want to, is what I don’t understand.” The police commissioner sounded unsettled. “Why on earth, Smylie? Is she a cruel woman? Is she unnatural?”
“But she’s right,” Gerry said. “You know Edith, sir. When she’s right—well.”
“Well, what then?” the commissioner said. “It’s not so damned obvious!”
“I think of it as a mercy on her part,” Gerry said coolly. “Look at our alternatives. Bury Liza in concrete? Like they did in Minnesota? We don’t want to be the next Minnesota, do we? We aren’t monsters.”
“Just fry a body on the chair and tell the papers it’s the Barrow woman’s,” drawled the governor’s lawyer.
A dreadful silence.
“Gentlemen. I was being facetious.”
Edith had smiled to herself, then had frowned, severely, at her own smile.
In Caroline’s sitting room, Edith sensed Peter behind her again. She didn’t hear him, for the rugs in Caroline’s home were shagged so thick, one’s shoes sank into them like mud. But he came in and out like a draft over her shoulder; nervous, irritable, smoky. Edith felt herself sit a little more stiffly upright.
Caroline did not, of course, persuade her mother to give up the duty she’d solemnly taken upon herself to satisfy. How had Peter found out, anyway? Edith wondered; then she recalled the governor’s lawyer was some sort of cousin of his. A silky conspiracy—it was almost flattering. Edith thought, as Caroline pleaded and seethed, I will go to the gallows this week. Just to see it. Just to make sure I’m prepared.
1899 Mar 21st.
David Archibald Michael CHAPEL, 18 (Sadistic Pleasure)
Chapel, a lonely, half-lamed youth from Back Bay, styled himself as a radical poet and concocted a fantasy of “the perfect murder.” At a music hall he approached Mary Tatosky, or Totoski, and Chapel, having offered a false name, flattered her rather pathetically until she agreed to meet him the next day. He took her to a secluded orchard, raped her, and smothered her with her coat, but fled when little red new mouths opened down the lengths of both her arms, sputtering and gasping for breath.
Mary never reported the crime, and Chapel grew impatient for it to be publicized. He telephoned the Globe to describe a vile murder he’d witnessed, but the press desk grew suspicious when he claimed the victim had been a woman. They traced the call, then reported Chapel to the police. In fact, Chapel’s perfect crime had miscarried from the start: he’d left fibers from his clothes at the orchard. The jury convicted him in under half an hour. He made a tearful statement while the noose was being fitted around his neck, but due to a hitch in the gallows occupying the hangman’s attention, whatever he’d wanted to say must go unrecorded.